Australian Politics

Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian has appealed her narrow loss to Nicolette Boele in Bradfield to the court of disputed returns. According to Professor Anne Twomey, no questions of law are raised in Kapterian’s challenge. Rather, the court is being asked to determine more mundane questions. Is that 1 actually a 7; is that 6 an 8? and so on.

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The last time the courts considered questions about ballot formality was in 2007 from the seat of McEwen. The resulting federal court case produced one of the more unusual judgments one will find in Australian law reports. Mitchell v Bailey (No 2) ****contains a lengthy tabular schedule, listing the disposition of 643 reserved ballots and – in 153 instances – reasons for Justice Richard Tracey’s assessments about ballot formality differing from those of the AEC. Examples include comments such as “Notations reasonably resemble numbers. In particular, three of them can be recognised as figures 7, 6, 5.” Why? How? Presumably, they just did to Tracey, just as they did not to AEC officials. No criticism of the late justice is intended; the point is to highlight just how subjective and hence seemingly unfair these assessments – and election outcomes – can appear.

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Here’s a modest proposal. For decades we’ve been training computers to recognise handwritten digits, principally for making mail processing and delivery more efficient. Massive datasets of real, handwritten digits have become one of the touchstones of machine learning, test beds for refining algorithms and global competition among researchers. The best algorithms have 99.82% accuracy in recognising digits. And the AEC itself uses digital scanning to process Senate ballot papers.